Philadelphia Orchestra's Verdi "Requiem' (1st review)

Verdi was a man of the theater rather than the church, and an agnostic to boot. No doubt precisely for that reason, he grasped the emotional key to human feelings far better than any priest wielding a scepter and reciting rote Te Deums. Verdi also perceived— much like Riccardo Muti and, to judge from this season's Philadelphia Orchestra schedule, Yannick Nézet-Séguin— that the most beautiful of all musical instruments is the human voice.

Verdi's version of the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead is a spectacular cathartic experience involving four mighty soloists and a 150-person chorus in addition to a full orchestra, but if you let it wash over you, you will find yourself channeling neither the compassion of Jesus nor any heavenly redemption but the earthbound love of the Egyptian slave girl Aida, not to mention the Hebrew slaves yearning for freedom in Nabucco.

To my mind, Verdi's Requiem conveyed the great composer's message to organized religion: When it comes to healing sorrow and pain, great art can do the job without your intercession, thanks just the same.

Soprano's allergies

So it was no surprise to me that, midway through the Philadelphia Orchestra's overwhelming performance of Verdi's Requiem Saturday night, I found myself awash in tears, thinking of my mother, a soprano who years ago sang this work with the New York Chorale Society and who, in the last week of her life, asked to hear a recording of it, presumably because the Verdi Requiem brought her more comfort and meaning than she could expect from a rabbi.

To Nézet-Séguin, the Orchestra's elf-like new music director, the Verdi Requiem is "the most human, the most directly sincere piece of music," presumably in contrast to the requiems by Mozart and Brahms that Yannick performed with the Orchestra over the past two seasons. I would agree, but I would add that Verdi's Requiem is also a demonstration of the sublime levels that humans can reach when large numbers of highly talented individuals coordinate their efforts in some endeavor other than military or industrial conquest.

Of the four soloists, especially notable was the statuesque Russian-born soprano Marina Poplavskaya, whose powerful voice filled the hall despite her apparent lack of flesh, bosom or even body projection. Saturday's audience was told beforehand that Poplavskaya was suffering that day from an allergy, which presumably explained her red nose and the handkerchief and thermos that she occasionally used, and which I interpreted as telling us, in so many words, "Give this woman a break if she isn't perfect tonight." All I can say is: If this is how Poplavskaya sounds when she's sick, on her next visit the Orchestra should sell people tickets to stand outside the hall on Broad Street, where passersby will hear her just fine if she's in top voice.

Contrast with Berlin

Nézet-Séguin set his bar very high in his first official weekend at the Orchestra's helm, and the packed house at Verizon Hall responded with well-deserved euphoria. By my count, some 500 concertgoers hung around afterward for his talkback, more than I've ever seen at an Orchestra post-concert event. Like me, these folks were juiced; suddenly, rushing to the parking garage to retrieve their cars— their customary preferred post-concert activity— was no longer their first priority.

One concertgoer asked Nézet-Séguin how the Philadelphia Orchestra compared to the other great orchestras he's conducted. Nézet-Séguin spoke respectfully of the Berlin Philharmonic's majestic tradition and the Vienna Philharmonic's charming capriciousness. But when he conducts the Philadelphia, he said, "There is a soul, which none of these [other] orchestras have— a sense of unity, of purpose, of dedication that can't be found anywhere else."

Solti in Chicago

Whether that's objectively true is beside the point; what matters is that Yannick seems to believe it. He sees the Philadelphia Orchestra not as a financial basket case but as the vehicle by which he will make his international reputation; and at 37 he possesses the necessary combination of talent, ambition and energy to make it happen (something that could not, I suspect, be said for an older and more accomplished conductor like Simon Rattle).

Think of the synergy that occurred in 1969 when a relatively unknown conductor named Georg Solti took charge of the declining Chicago Symphony. Together they were widely acclaimed, over the next 22 years, as the world's greatest orchestra. Yannick's inaugural weekend offers hope that something similar could happen in Philadelphia, if he can sustain the high expectations he has set with his first concerts.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohn, click here.
To read a response, click here.
To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.